CaryWalkin

I'm an accountant by profession, I use excel every day of my life. I simply worked with what I knew. Also there is an old adage that underneath every RPG is a massive spreadsheet, so now the massive spreadsheet IS the RPG!

I've been away from the office for months doing an MBA, so most of my co-workers had no idea what I was working on. A couple weeks ago when I went back for a visit I saw that everyone was playing the game in the office!

EDIT: Not everyone, but a lot more people than I would've expected at an accounting firm.

This is actually much harder to do than it sounds, a number of calculations are dependent on the background colour of a cell (such as if you are standing on fire). Currently, my focus is on adding new content to the game. Also, while I know this game is getting played a lot in offices around the world, I don't know if that is something I should be promoting... Someone has to think about the GDP! As such, my answer to this is maybe. :)

Because the macros are a giant mess of me forcing things to work. The code itself is actually quite embarrassing. I understand people's desire to tinker with things so I started releasing code snippets of standalone systems that would be cleaned up and easy for people to understand. See VBA4Play Movement and Collision Detection for an example of what I'm trying to do. The interesting thing is even when I released the code that I thought was clean, I still got a ton of feedback from the community for how it could have been done better. I am just not a coding expert.

Totally valid concern. However I would have the same concern with almost all software that I run on my computer. I have tried to mitigate this concern by slapping my name on it all over the place so there would be a huge reputational risk to me if there was a deliberate attempt to install malware. Given that this is being released for free so that I can get exposure for a future career in the games industry, there are no incentives for me to do anything involving malware.

The interesting experience for me has been that as a content distributor , I am now seeing Arena.Xlsm pop up on unauthorized hosts (anything that is not my blog). There is a very real risk that those copies may have malware in them (speculation on my part) and there appears to be nothing I can do to stop that. Even if I released the code in full, those copies are outside of my control and could contain malware.